Gary Stern reports on the situation in New York
With a rare level of urgency, school officials are scrambling to keep extensive student records out of a privately run database that is a key part of the state’s reform agenda.
Local officials, once again at odds with the state Education Department, have grave concerns about what will happen to more than 400 categories of student data once they are uploaded to a Web cloud run by inBloom, a non-profit group funded by the Gates Foundation and supported by Amazon.
[…]
More than 20 districts in the Lower Hudson Valley have pulled out of New York’s participation in the federal Race to the Top initiative, hoping that doing so will allow them to withhold certain data. Since the state has said that this strategy will not work, districts are now writing to inBloom directly and requesting that their student records be deleted.
Read more on LoHud. The districts’ request will not be honored, though, because inBloom has no direct contract with districts and the state education department has already indicated it will not honor districts’ requests on this.
Any lawyers think there are grounds for a federal lawsuit by districts against the state?